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Joining The Dots

I have now published my new book, Joining The Dots, which offers a fresh look at the Atlantis mystery. I have addressed the critical questions of when, where and who, using Plato's own words, tempered with some critical thinking and a modicum of common sense.

dos Santos

The Persian Gulf is just one of a variety of areas identified as having been mainly exposed land prior to the melting of the glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age(a). Archaeologist Dr. Jeffery Rose(b) recounts how this land which contained a large oasis used by humans from at least 74,000 years ago was finally inundated by the Indian Ocean around 6000 BC(c) Rose believes that “there is compelling evidence to suggest that both the Flood and Eden myths may be rooted in these events around the Gulf basin.” His views are more fully outlined in the December 2010 issue of the distinguished journal Current Anthropology(d). This idea has been well received by some of his peers.

It has also been speculated that the Gulf may have been home to Plato’s Atlantis(e). This theory would place the Pillars of Heracles at the Strait of Hormuz.

A recent article(f) by Marilyn Luongo placing Atlantis in Mesopotamia, also identifies Hormuz as the location of the ‘Pillars’.

However, the Gulf is just one of a number of sites such as Doggerland in the North Sea and Sundaland in the South China Sea that have been proposed as the location of submerged Atlantis. At this point we are only dealing with speculation as no coherent argument has been adduced to identify any of those locations with the possible exception of Sundaland, where at least a credible case has been put forward by researchers such as dos Santos and Lauritzen, but not without weaknesses in their contention.

Genesis, the first book of the Bible, with its account of the antediluvian world has been compared with the description of Atlantis prior to its inundation. Joseph Robert Jochmans has offered a comparison of the two accounts and concluded that their similarities suggest a common source with the usual distortions encountered when an original story is transmitted orally over long periods of time and frequently translated via a number of languages before being put in writing and so enduring the perils of transcription errors, not to mention the risk deliberate falsification.

In Atlantis: The Antediluvian World,a chapter entitled Genesis Contains a History of Atlantis, Ignatius Donnelly unconvincingly attempted to link Atlantis with Genesis.

Atlantis was named after the Titan Atlas, whose father Iapetus has been identified with Japheth (Genesis 9.25-27), the son of Noah, a subject which is investigated at length by Walter Reinhold Warttig Mattfeld y de la Torre(a).Frank Joseph has suggested that Noah was an Atlantean[108.85].

Another suggested link with Genesis has been to identify Atlantis with the Garden of Eden. However, most of the wide range of proposed locations for Eden are on land and rarely coincide with any of the equally varied proposed locations for Atlantis. One exception was the late Professor Arysio dos Santos who located Eden in the South China Sea.

John Nichols wrote a long article(b) identifying Atlantis with the Garden of Eden and placing it on the Celtic Shelf about a hundred miles off the coast of France west of Brest.

Checklists have been published by a number of authors that compare the features of Plato’s Atlantis with that of their preferred location and that of other writers. While such lists can appear impressive they suffer from a number of defects. First the lists are drawn up arbitrarily(a) and frequently omit headings that may not suit the theory of its compiler, but might support a competing view. Secondly, another excuse for not including particular items is often done on the grounds that they were just modifications by Plato. Finally, since Plato’s text contains various ambiguities and contradictions, some list headings are capable of more than one interpretation, for example, the location of the Pillars of Heracles or the date of Atlantis’ destruction.

Finally, if the Atlantis narrative is accepted as a mixture of detail from more than one source, possibly separated by thousands of years, it is meaningless to include everything in a single list. An example of this might be where the clues to the location of the Atlantean capital might be based on a very ancient source but the description of its architecture may have been inspired by structures from a different location, possibly from Plato’s own experience. In such a case the two will never be discovered together.

In the case of Indonesia, Dos Santos drew up a 32-point checklist(b), which has now been adopted and expanded to 60 points(e) by Dhani Irwanto, who published Atlantis: The lost city is in Java Sea[1093] in 2015.

The Atlantis Conference of 2005 concluded with the drafting of a list of 24 criteria(f), which must be met to qualify as Plato’s lost city. Jim Allen initially expanded this list to 34 points(a) and in December 2010 added a further 16 , bringing his new total up to 50 criteria(d), chosen with an obvious bias towards his own Bolivian theory.

The 2005 conference also led to the drafting of the Atlantis Research Charter, which although not a checklist in the sense that I have used it, does provide a rational set of guidelines for researchers to follow, firmly rejecting pseudoscience, dogmatism and abuse for political or religious ends.

Olof Rudbeck who proposed his native Sweden as the home of Atlantis included in his Atlantica, 102 ‘proofs’ in support of his theory.

The most recent (2016) checklist from Philip Runggaldier, not unexpectedly, points to his chosen location of the Celtic Shelf rather than Minoan Crete as the location of Atlantis. Not, in my mind, a fair comparison.

*My book, Joining the Dots, as far as I’m aware, raises for the first time in any detail, the obvious prerequisites for a successful invasion. Obviously Invaders require a powerful army, military intelligence (spies) and the ability to keep supply lines as short as possible. The latter demands that military expansionism is directed at neighbouring territories, a fact confirmed by the manner in which all ancient empires developed. However, when it comes to checklists the need for proximity is conveniently ignored as can be seen by its absence from the lists compiled by advocates of some of the more extreme Atlantis locations, such as, Antarctica, America or Indonesia. At least some Plato’s Atlantis identifiers can be linked with most proposed locations, but if they are not within ‘striking distance’ of ancient Athens, they cannot be Atlantis.*